Wikimedia Language engineering

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The Wikimedia Foundation Language team is responsible for providing standards-based internationalization and localization tools support for Wikimedia sites on the Web and mobile platforms. The group is part of the larger Editing department in the Wikimedia Product group.

More than 300 languages are provided with internationalization support at various levels across Wikimedia projects, of which the Wikipedias are the largest, with 289 languages. The tools created and maintained by the Language team are continually updated to increase the number of languages these tools cover. The goal of the team is to provide the same level of support for all languages and to provide translation tools.

Content translation – The content translation tool is a computer-assisted translation (CAT) tool aimed at making the translation of Wikipedia articles easier and better. The tool targets users who know two or more languages, and will provide value for different kinds of users. For new users, the tool will provide a new way of contributing that is easier than creating a new page from scratch. For experienced editors, the tool will simplify the process of translating content. This extension is currently in development. Read more

Universal Language Selector – Universal Language Selector (ULS) provides a flexible method of selecting and configuring a language to use in the user interface. It provides options to select fonts and input method. Languages can be searched using the ISO language code, with language names written in current user interface language or in its own script (autonym). Depending upon the user's location or the browser/operating system's language, the user interface language will be suggested. Cross-language searches – using any script – can also be done. Read more

Translate – Translate extension is a feature-rich extension that lets users translate software strings and pages in their browser. For both software and page translation, it supports translation memory, statistics by group and language, advanced grammar support for multiple languages, and more.

MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle – The MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle is a collection of selected MediaWiki extensions needed by any wiki that wants to be multilingual. It follows a monthly release cycle. Get the latest release. The following extensions are part of the bundle:

Project Milkshake – Project Milkshake aims to make generic jQuery components for commonly needed internationalization feature components that have been developed for use through MediaWiki in Wikimedia projects. These include input methods, web-fonts, and grammatical rules for languages. For easy participation and wider adoption, the source-code repositories are hosted on GitHub and the components have been dual-licensed as GPL and MIT.

jQuery.ime – More than 150 input methods in various languages are provided through jQuery.ime; many of these methods have been contributed by the Wikimedia community. See Demo.

jQuery.i18n – This library provides internationalization elements to support grammatical rules for languages, including rules for plural forms and gender. See Prototype.

jQuery.webfonts – jQuery.webfonts uses the WebFonts technology to allow usage of fonts from a font repository. This eliminates dependency on system fonts while viewing pages in those languages. Read more about webfonts

More details of how we maintain the different projects can be found in: